Microsoft says B(lack)SODs not linked to latest patches

Microsoft is denying that the latest Patch Tuesday has resulted in some PCs …

Microsoft is denying reports of the Black Screen of Death on a number of PCs. A fraction of Windows users have been complaining their computers were locking up and displaying a Black Screen of Death (BSOD, not to be confused with Blue Screen of Death, which is usually due to hardware or driver failure) after the last Microsoft Patch Tuesday on November 10, 2009.

"Microsoft has investigated reports that its November security updates made changes to permissions in the registry that that are resulting in system issues for some customers," a Microsoft spokesperson told Ars. "The company has found those reports to be inaccurate and our comprehensive investigation has shown that none of the recently released updates are related to the behavior described in the reports."

"While we were not contacted by the organization who originally made these reports, we have proactively contacted them with our findings. Our support organization is also not seeing this as an issue. The claims also do not match any known issues that have been documented in the security bulletins or KB articles."

Security company Prevx first claimed the latest patches were making changes to the Access Control List (ACL), a list of permissions for a logged-on user, in the registry. The result was some installed applications (especially security products) failing to run properly, causing a BSOD on Windows -2000, NT, XP, Vista, and 7, according to Prevx. The security company released their own fix that reportedly makes the appropriate changes in the registry (this can also be done manually) to match the ACL settings.

Today though, Prevx has changed its stance on the issue: "Having narrowed down a specific trigger for this condition we've done quite a bit of testing and re-testing on the recent Windows patches including KB976098 and KB915597 as referred to in our previous blog. Since more specifically narrowing down the cause we have been able to exonerate these patches from being a contributory factor."

"We apologize to Microsoft for any inconvenience our blog may have caused. This has been a challenging issue to identify. Users who have the black screen issue referred to can still safely use our free fix tool to restore their desktop icons and taskbar."

When we contacted Microsoft yesterday, the software giant wasn't yet ready to comment on the reported issue. Instead, the company said it was investigating, and apparently that stage is now complete; Microsoft has concluded its patches are not to blame. We have not encountered computers that have had this problem, so we're not sure of the scope of affected users, but since the problem still remains, we'll follow this story closely as it unfolds.